Pitch raise vs fine tune thoughts 💭

Henry

Hello all,

I’m steadily getting more familiar and used to pianoscope after a few weeks and lots of tunings.

I’m starting to get much better results with the pitch raise mode, new software takes practice!

I did a 3hz pitch raise on a restored Blüthner style vi today. After a 30 minute blast on pitch raise mode the whole piano seemed to settle nicely and the overpull calculations were spot on. It still took me another hour or so to fine tune it…took me a while to figure out how the pins wanted to be set on that piano.

Measuring the pitch for all keys chromatically before starting was well worth the extra minute or so.

I also tuned a Blüthner model C, and did a more modest pitch raise of about 10 cents.

It’s so nice to be able to do very small overpulls when needed, even for very close to pitch pianos which might have the odd outlier which needs more overpull.

When do other pianoscopers decide to just fine tune, 5 cents? More? Depends?

Is there any drawback I’ve not thought of when tuning on pitch raise mode when fine tuning?

Frank Illenberger

Henry The only drawback of always using pitch-raise mode is that you need to tune in fixed ascending order and that you have to pre-measure the pitches. If you have to measure the IH anyway, the latter does not matter.

Rick

5¢ is my limit. Anymore than that is pitch raise mode. Keep up the good work.

MilanDka

Even my limit is around 5 cents. Anything beyond this limit, I use the pitch-raising mode. Only when I need to lower the pitch, my limit is 10 cents—but only for brand-new instruments, where it can naturally drop by about 5 Hz within 2–3 days.

Henry

Good to know thanks both!

My previous software could do small overpull calculations, but it would take time on every note to calculate the overpull. And it only remembered the last 10 notes you’ve tuned so you could end up in situations where you want to revisit a section and it will start calculating a new smaller overpull.

You can make it work but it became inefficient for very small pitch raises/lowering.

I much prefer the pianoscope system!